Associative Coherence and Decision-Making Bias

Hello everyone. In this video, we will understand about a very important
feature that impacts our decision-making
and leads us to making certain
decision-making errors. We call these as
decision-making biases and we will learn
about this feature, which is called as
associative coherence. Let me begin with a very
simple and general example of decision-making, and we'll see how do we
take decisions and what happens to us when we
are making decisions? Let us begin with
this situation. Let's imagine a father and son, they are driving in a car and their car meets a
horrible accident. In this car accident,
the father dies. Son is also injured and is rushed to a hospital
for a surgery. He is into the
operation theater, the doctor comes, everybody
is ready for the surgery, just when the surgery
is about to start, doctor looks at
the boy and says, I cannot operate this boy. This boy is my son. Now my question to you is, if this is the situation, who is the doctor. I would want you to think
about the situation carefully and write down the answer to this question on
your note books. Well, the answer
to this question is this doctor is
the boy's mother. Many of us think that, how could this be possible? Father is dead but
then the doctor says, I cannot operate this boy
because he is my son. Then this is a
decision-making bias, this is a stereotype. This is a problem when we
think about the situation, very rarely do we think about that this doctor could
be boy's mother. Now we want to look at what
happens when we are taking decisions and why do we make these kind of errors when it
comes to decision-making? Let us look at this
pattern on the board and I want you to think about and read for yourself
what this pattern is. Let's look at another pattern
and read for yourself, what do you see on the board? Now, let's look at both
these patterns together. You will notice that the
stimulus in the center of both the patterns
is exactly the same. However, when you read
the first pattern, you read it as or many others
would read it as A, B, and C but when we read
the second pattern, many of us will read it as 12, 13, and 14. Now what happens? The stimulus is the same but when we are
taking decisions, we are influenced by what
has happened before, what comes before the stimulus and what is coming
after the stimulus because we saw A and C, we thought the pattern is B. Because
we saw 12 and 14, we thought that
the pattern is 13, then this is a problem. This is a problem, this is a bias and
this feature of decision-making is called
as associative coherence. We make coherence of
the stimulus that we see by looking at what has happened before or
after and the stimulus is interpreted so that it is
coherent to what we know. Ambiguity is suppressed, we become very confident and positive about our decisions and the frightening
thing is that this happens at top speed
even without thinking, we take certain decisions. The pattern, the stimulus, the situation that is before us, we look at it so as
to make what we know, coherence with what we know, so we want to fit it in. Very rarely we recognize that the pattern
could be random. Pattern could be different
from what we know and this feature is the
associative coherence, which makes us take or make certain big errors in
our decision-making. Remember the stimulus
that you may be seeing may actually
be different. It is not necessary
that it should be coherent and this feature of coherence could
lead us to making many decision-making
errors. Thank you.

The Anchoring Bias

Hello learners, in
an earlier video, we had learnt about the feature
of associative coherence, which told us that when
we look at a stimulus, we tend to interpret it in
accordance with what we know, in accordance with what has
happened before the stimulus, and what's happening around it. We will try to fit the stimulus, the new event, or situation in accordance
with what is going on. Now, this feature can
lead to multiple biases. We look at one very important
bias of decision-making, which is called as the
anchoring bias in this video. Let's start with a situation. There was a very nice experiment
that was once conducted. There were two groups of people who were given a question. The first group was given a question and the
question said, is the average price of
a German car more or less than Indian
rupees, 25 lakhs? The group was shown
the statement, and then they were
asked to write the number that
comes to their mind. I would want you to
look at this situation, look at this question
and write the answer. You've got to write a number. The question is, is the average price of a German car more or
less than 25 lakhs? After you have
written the answer, let's look at what the
other group was shown. The other group was shown a similar question but
the question said, is the average price of
a German car more or less than Indian
rupees, five lakhs? They were again asked
to report a number. They were asked to write
a number that they think would be appropriate
for this question. It was very interestingly found out that the group which was shown 25 lakhs and you must look at the
number that you wrote, more or less many people
at on an average, the number that was reported by the first group was somewhere
between 15-40 lakhs. That means the people were writing that
the average price of a German car in India ranges from somewhere
between 15-40 lakhs. They reported different kind of numbers. The other group,
which was five lakhs, when their answers were checked, what was found was
this group actually reported numbers ranging
from 2-20 lakhs. Now, what does this mean? It means that everything
remains the same. The German cars remain the same, the Indian currency
remains the same. But what has changed? Just a small piece of information in the question
to the first group, it was shown that
the average price of a German car is more
or less than 25 lakhs. The second group was
shown is the price more or less than five
lakhs. What happened? The first group of people started working with
25 in their mind. The second group of people
started working with five in their mind and this led to
differences in their answers. There was a
significant difference between the numbers reported by the group which saw 25 lakhs and the numbers reported by the
group that saw five lakhs. This bias is called as
the anchoring bias. We get anchored to certain pieces of
information that come to us. Associative coherence,
remember it told us that our brain likes
to put the stimulus that it sees in coherence
with the answers that it is going to make
is going to be in coherence with the
numbers that it is seeing, the patterns it is seeing. Because it saw 25 lakhs the decision was
close to 25 lakhs. The second case, because it saw five lakhs the
answer was close to, in general about five lakhs. There is an activation of
compatible associations. We try to make sense of the stimulus
that is coming to us. Anchors could be anything, it could be general statements
made by your friends. It could be some information that you see in the newspaper. It could be even a
passing comment. Just imagine a situation. This may have happened
to you many times. You are in the office, everything is going very well. Suddenly a friend
comes to you and says, well, I'm having a very bad day. This organization is not
very good and so on. Just a statement that the organization is not
very good what happens is your brain now invokes those
compatible associations. It is now making coherence of the information that
it has obtained. This is a very
problematic thing. We get anchored to
many situations, many prior pieces
of information. The question that we saw in a prior video where the father and son had met a car crash
and the doctor was mother. It was a gender stereotype. Stereotypes are also anchors. There are different
anchors that can make us exhibit this bias. We must try to overcome this bias by looking at
more pieces of information. Please look at more pieces of information before
you make a decision. You must look at the numbers, you must look at the data or the evidence before you jump to a decision. Thank
you very much.

The Availability Bias

Hello learner. In this video,
we'll learn about another bias that is associated with the feature
of associative coherence and this bias is called as
the availability bias. We had learned that associative
coherence is a feature where our brain starts to make decisions in coherence
with what it already knows. In coherence with the data with the
numbers that it is already familiar with. Let's start with a question,
let's ponder on this question. The question is, will you pay to get
a one Lakh insurance for car travel? The other question is, will you pay to
get a one Lakh insurance for air travel? International Air travel? Will you be willing to pay to
get insurance for air travel? Now these are two questions. Will you pay to get insurance for
car travel? Will you pay to get insurance for
air travel? Think about these questions and write the answer to these
questions in your notebook. It has been found,
research today tells us that when people are asked this kind
of a question most often, it has been found that people are likely
to respond yes to the air travel. And generally no to car travel. Then asked why do you say this? They feel that air travel is riskier,
more dangerous than car travel. Now, the question before us is what's
the probability of a car crash and what's the probability of a plane crash? Well, air travel for your information is
one of the safest modes of travel today. Car travel on the other hand,
is fretted with risk, there is a great danger of accident
actually every minute or so. There is an accident happening somewhere
in India, somewhere around the world. It is a very risky proposition. However, when people are asked
will you buy car travel insurance, most of them don't because they
think air travel is riskier. On the other hand, just think of
air travel, it is very, very safe. But why does this happen? Why do people answer that we
will buy air travel insurance? Because if you think about your own self, our brain is actually much more
likely to generate visuals, imagery examples of an air crash
airplane crash than a car crash. When an airplane crashes, what happens? The news of the crash is
covered in all media. It is there on the social media,
it is there in the print media, it is their online media,
it is, they're everywhere. Our brains are bombarded with this
piece of information that there has been an airplane crash. It is there in our mind and
our mind, our brain can very easily recollect situations and
examples of airplane crash. On the other hand,
car crashes actually so rudimentary, it is actually so frequent that we
don't even pay attention to the news. It is covered in some corner of the
newspaper somewhere hidden in the media. So our brain does not pay
too much often attention. What happens in the process is we
violate the norms of probability. We go by what we can easily recollect
rather than actually going by the numbers, the statistics and the evidence. This bias is called as
the availability bias. Availability bias tells us that we
are likely to take decisions for which information is more
readily available to us, which we can recollect more easily. And then we don't actually go by data
numbers, statistics, probability. We actually leave it aside and we are focused on the information
that is available to us. We rely on our memory when taking
decisions rather than frequency rather than statistics and
rather than probability. Once again,
if we have to overcome this bias, it is very clear that we
have to take a pause. We have to stop ourselves
think about this situation and ask ourselves, is it good enough
to just bank on the memory? Because remember associative coherence,
anything that we remember, our brain starts to work around
that piece of information. We've got to step aside from that and
then use the data, use the number, use the analysis, use the evidence
to actually base our decisions on. Otherwise, we may make errors in our
decisions and that would be wrong. Thank you very much. [MUSIC]

Overconfidence and Confirmation Bias


[MUSIC] Hello learner. In this video we learn about the next two
biases that are related to the feature of associative coherence, and which lead
to errors in our decision making. These are called as the overconfidence
bias and confirmation bias. Let's look at this situation. Let's imagine there are three individuals,
Venugopal, Matthew and Deepa who are secretaries
in an organization and their task is to type out reports. Venugopal is from Chennai,
Matthews from Kerala and Deepa comes from a small village in Bihar. Their typing speeds are given:
Venugopal types 60 words per minute, Matthew types 50 words per minute and
Deepa types 30 words per minute. If I were to show you this data and
I was to give you this information, what would we say about Deepa's performance? Most likely we would come to
the conclusion that Deepa is the laggard in the group. Deepa is not a good performer. She is the slowest in typing and so obviously third in out of
the three individuals. However, let me show you some
more pieces of information. The first piece of information
is that while Matthew and Venugopal had other jobs before
joining the organization, this is Deepa's first job. She joined three months ago. What do you think about
Deepa's performance now? Just think about it, reflect on it and you
can write the answer in your notebooks. Let's look at some more
pieces of information. The next piece of information is Venugopal
and Matthew have new imported typewriters. Their keyboards are actually better, whereas Deepa has an old keyboard
which breaks down frequently. What do you think about
Deepa's performance now? Let's look at another piece
of evidence: Venugopal and Matthew's work is typing of simple reports
in English and they still make some errors. On the other hand, Deepa
actually is given mathematical and statistical data to type out and
her work is error free. What do we think about
Deepa's performance now? And the last piece of information is
that Deepa does her typing by touch, Venugopal and Matthew are always
looking at the keyboard. Does that change our answer? What's the evaluation that
we have about Deepa? Just think about this situation. We started out by looking at Venugopal,
Matthew and Deepa there's typing speed, 60 words per minute, 50 words per
minute and 30 words per minute. And then we looked at additional
pieces of information and we looked at how our own judgment, our own decision about
Deepa's performance, changes over time as we see
additional information. The first image of Deepa which we had when
we saw that first piece of information and then the last image when we have seen
all this information that we have seen. What does this tell us about our own
judgments, our own decision making? We are very likely to take decisions
based on selective information. We may make errors if we look
at information only selectively. We look at data only selected. So there are two biases that we
must be careful about when we are taking decisions. The first one is what is
called as confirmation bias. If we have seen Deepa's performance
as 30 words per minute, the confirmation bias
tells us that I look for information that confirms
to my hypothesis. Or confirms to my judgment that
Deepa is a poor performer. I may actually close my search and
look for only that piece of evidence which will support my decision
that Deepa is a poor performer. But I want to show you that
the evidence that I provided was against Deepa being a poor performer. So there may be some piece of information
that we may not actually look at because I have made a decision. And then I will only confirm, look at
information that confirms to my decision. And that's a big bias because
remember we may be driven by that associative coherence. Which is the tendency to take
a decision in coherence with what you already know and
that could be wrong. On the other hand, overconfidence bias. Again, what is overconfidence? Because I
am so confident that my answer is right, I don't look at other
pieces of information. We are more likely to be confident about
our decisions than it is reasonable. If you are not looking on
additional pieces of information, then the decision you are reaching
may actually be wrong. You will have to actually
look at information that disconfirms your hypothesis. Disconfirms your judgment. If you cannot find any such information, then you can believe that your judgment
is right, that your decision is right. But if there is an evidence that
disconfirms your first decision, your first judgment, then you must
be willing to change your decision. Otherwise, you will be driven by the
confirmation bias, which is selectively looking at information to confirm to
your decision and overconfidence bias. Which is believing that you are right, you are right in this situation in
order to take care of these biases. Remember searching for data, searching for evidence that this confirms to our
hypothesis is the only measure, and we must do it honestly and sincerely. Thank you very much. [MUSIC]

Framing Bias


Hello learner. In this video, we'll look at one more bias that is related to the feature
of associative coherence, and this bias is called
as the framing bias. Let us start by looking
at a set of questions. The question is, out
of these two options, which will you prefer? Fifty percent chance
of winning 200, or 100% chance of winning 100? You have to respond to
this set of questions. What's your preference? Write it down in your notebook. After you have written
the answer to this set of questions let's look at
another set of questions. This set of questions says, you have a 50% chance
of losing zero, and a 50% chance of losing 200. On the other hand, the other question is, you have a sure loss. 100 percent chance of
losing rupees 100. Out of these two options, which option will you prefer? You have to write the
answer in your notebook. Now after you have responded to both these set of questions,
compare your responses. When I first asked you, what will you prefer? 100 percent chance
of winning 100, or a 50% chance of winning 200, 50% chance of winning zero. In general, it has been seen, most of us are likely
to respond that I will choose 100%
chance of winning 100. Look at your answer. What did you write? On the other hand
when we look at 50% chance of losing 200, 50% chance of losing zero, and a 100% chance of
losing 100, in general, most of us are likely to
respond that I will choose 50% chance of losing 200 and
a 50% chance of losing zero. What does this tell
us about ourselves? When it comes to
looking at gains, when it comes to winning, we are all risk averse. When it comes to losses, failures, we become
risk-seeking. This is a tendency that has been shown and demonstrated
multiple times. This is a bias that is
called as a framing bias. When it comes to losses, we are willing to lose even 200 in the hope and
that is I may not, I may lose only zero. But when it comes to gain, we were willing to let go
of a gain of 200% or so. But we did not choose
a gain of 200, we actually went for
a gain of 100 only. We become risk averse. Then it came to loss we
became risk-seeking. Now let me give you an example. Let us imagine there
are two people, one person invests in a
fixed deposit in a bank. The other person invest in equity in stock markets
and mutual funds. How do these two people look
at their gains and losses? The fixed deposit
person will say, I don't want to
invest in equity, I am very happy with the
sure gain of 5% or 6%, from my bank account. At least I'm getting it. There may be a gain of
15% from mutual fund, but I may also lose money because stock
markets may also crash. I become risk-averse when I
am in this frame of a gain. What does the person who is investing in equities
and mutual funds say? The person says, if you
invest in fixed deposit, there is a sure loss, because inflation is going
to eat up your money. Inflation is going to take
away because the inflation, let's say 7% your
money is growing at 5% you are at a net loss of 2%. There is a sure loss
in your option. On the other hand, when it comes to equities and mutual funds, I may lose, but I
may also gain more. When we look at this
situation from a loss frame, we suddenly find that
taking risk is all right. Taking risk is actually good in this
particular situation. Similarly, a salaried
person and an entrepreneur. A salaried person would say I'm very happy with my salary. I don't want to be
an entrepreneur. I may make money but I may also lose
whatever I'm getting. There's a sure
gain in my salary. An entrepreneur on the
other hand would say, well, if you keep working
in a job there's a sure loss because you are not getting what you are worth. On the other hand if I startup I may make
money I may lose, but in the other option
there is a short loss. These people then are
willing to take risk. They get the courage. This is a bias that
has been talked about in literature
as the framing bias. It shows that people should however be indifferent
to probabilities, the expectations in the
case of 50% of 200, and 50% of zero, and a sure gain of 100. The utility, if we were to calculate the expectation
is the same,100 rupees. But people are more
likely to take risk when they look at the situation
in the frame of losses. When they are looking at the
situation in terms of gains, they become risk averse. What is the lesson? What is the message for us? When we look at the
information coming to us, we must not stick to one frame. It is always
beneficial to look at this situation from a gain frame if you are in a loss frame. If you are looking at this
situation from the gain frame, you must look at it from
the loss frame also, it will help you look
at the possibilities, the compromises that
you will have to make, and will give you an opportunity to take
better decisions. Otherwise, the general
tendency is that the gain frame will always lead to a risk-averse decision, a loss frame will always lead to a risk-seeking decision.
Thank you very much.

Attribute Substitution and Representative Bias

Hello learner. In this video, we learn about
the second important features that impacts our decision making and
that is attribute substitution. Let us start by looking at a situation. There was a very nice interesting
experiment that was conducted. A group of individuals were
asked these two questions and the questions were asked
in a sequential manner. They were first asked the question,
what's your level of overall happiness? And then afterwards they were
asked the second question, how many dates did you have last month? Now dates is not the fruit date, it is
how many outings with your girlfriend or boyfriend did you have last month? Their answers were looked at and an association was calculated
correlation in the answers on happiness. And how many dates did they have last
month was calculated and the answer. The correlation between the two
answers was non-significant, very small, -.12. Another group of people, individuals, were asked
the same two questions but they were asked in a different order. They were first asked the question, how many dates did you have last
month again, not the fruit date. How many outings did you
have with your girlfriend or boyfriend in the last month and
second, what's your level of happiness? You would be surprised to know
that the correlation that was non-significant, -0.12 in the first group, jumped to .66 for
the second group, there was a high association
that was found between the answer on happiness and
the answer on dates. What does this tell us? This feature is called as
the attributes substitution. If I were to ask you just think
about yourself your life and say, well how happy you are. That's a difficult question, isn't it? How happy I am? My happiness depends on a lot of things. What's going on in my personal life? What's going on in my professional life? What's happening at the job front? Am I doing what I like? There's so many things that impact
me when it comes to happiness. But if I were to ask you a question,
how happy you are or satisfied you are working in
your present organization. And then I want to ask
you how happy you are?. Now what have I given you? I have given you a peg I
have given you a crutch on which I can then ask
the happiness question. The first question on organization
is a little more specific. I can easily answer the question on am I
satisfied with my organization or not? Then I ask the happiness question. What happens is the brain
substitutes the difficult question which is the overall happiness
with the attributes of the question that I have just
answered which is organization. So the attributes,
the question of organization is then used to answer
the question of happiness and this feature of our brain is
called as attribute substitution. We kind of superimpose things and
aspects of a particular event,
a particular situation. A particular individual and then
superimposed on a lot of other things. Let's look at kind of a situation. Praguni is 31 years old, single,
outspoken and very bright. She did her MBA as a student and she was deeply concerned with
the issues of discrimination. And social justice and also participated
in anti nuclear demonstration. And then I would ask you to tell me,
given this first piece of information, what do you think Praguni
does when she has grown up? She is an investment banker and
is active in feminist movement and she is active in feminist movement. Out of these three options,
which do you think would be more likely? You can think about it. There are two arguments, Praguni is
more likely to be an investment banker, some women investment bankers are not
feminist and Praguni is one of them. Praguni is more likely to be a feminist
investment banker than she is likely to be an investment banker, because she resembles an active
feminist more than she resembles an investment banker. Now, it has been found that
people are more likely to choose the second argument
over the first argument. But let me tell you in this case, in this
situation, all three are equally likely. We tend to believe that Praguni would
be doing something because we have seen one specific characteristic which
is what she was doing as an MBA student. Now, we tend to superimpose that
we extrapolate that information to other things and
other situations as well about her career. We make decisions about what would be
her liking in terms of her career, the choices that she would be making etc. One trait induces judgments about
multiple traits and multiple dimensions. And this bias is called
as representative bias. Just by looking at one specific
thing we feel it is representative of the entire set of characteristics,
the entire individual. In extreme cases we can endorse a trait,
we can endorse the quality even when there
is no direct evidence of it. Well, think about how would
Praguni be dressing what kind of choices she would be having about
her food etc and that's a bias. That's a problem in decision making. Our brains do not keep track of the source
of information, they keep substituting. We don't remember what was
the piece of information, what was that relevant to the question
that I am now answering? But we keep substituting
those difficult questions and we ignore rationality,
we ignore laws of probability, and we are extremely poor at
recognizing randomness. And that's a big problem of attributes
substitution which leads to one of the important biases
which is representative bias. Thank you very much [MUSIC]

Hello learner. In this video, we'll look at one more bias that is related to the feature
of associative coherence, and this bias is called
as the framing bias. Let us start by looking
at a set of questions. The question is, out
of these two options, which will you prefer? Fifty percent chance
of winning 200, or 100% chance of winning 100? You have to respond to
this set of questions. What's your preference? Write it down in your notebook. After you have written
the answer to this set of questions let's look at
another set of questions. This set of questions says, you have a 50% chance
of losing zero, and a 50% chance of losing 200. On the other hand, the other question is, you have a sure loss. 100 percent chance of
losing rupees 100. Out of these two options, which option will you prefer? You have to write the
answer in your notebook. Now after you have responded to both these set of questions,
compare your responses. When I first asked you, what will you prefer? 100 percent chance
of winning 100, or a 50% chance of winning 200, 50% chance of winning zero. In general, it has been seen, most of us are likely
to respond that I will choose 100%
chance of winning 100. Look at your answer. What did you write? On the other hand
when we look at 50% chance of losing 200, 50% chance of losing zero, and a 100% chance of
losing 100, in general, most of us are likely to
respond that I will choose 50% chance of losing 200 and
a 50% chance of losing zero. What does this tell
us about ourselves? When it comes to
looking at gains, when it comes to winning, we are all risk averse. When it comes to losses, failures, we become
risk-seeking. This is a tendency that has been shown and demonstrated
multiple times. This is a bias that is
called as a framing bias. When it comes to losses, we are willing to lose even 200 in the hope and
that is I may not, I may lose only zero. But when it comes to gain, we were willing to let go
of a gain of 200% or so. But we did not choose
a gain of 200, we actually went for
a gain of 100 only. We become risk averse. Then it came to loss we
became risk-seeking. Now let me give you an example. Let us imagine there
are two people, one person invests in a
fixed deposit in a bank. The other person invest in equity in stock markets
and mutual funds. How do these two people look
at their gains and losses? The fixed deposit
person will say, I don't want to
invest in equity, I am very happy with the
sure gain of 5% or 6%, from my bank account. At least I'm getting it. There may be a gain of
15% from mutual fund, but I may also lose money because stock
markets may also crash. I become risk-averse when I
am in this frame of a gain. What does the person who is investing in equities
and mutual funds say? The person says, if you
invest in fixed deposit, there is a sure loss, because inflation is going
to eat up your money. Inflation is going to take
away because the inflation, let's say 7% your
money is growing at 5% you are at a net loss of 2%. There is a sure loss
in your option. On the other hand, when it comes to equities and mutual funds, I may lose, but I
may also gain more. When we look at this
situation from a loss frame, we suddenly find that
taking risk is all right. Taking risk is actually good in this
particular situation. Similarly, a salaried
person and an entrepreneur. A salaried person would say I'm very happy with my salary. I don't want to be
an entrepreneur. I may make money but I may also lose
whatever I'm getting. There's a sure
gain in my salary. An entrepreneur on the
other hand would say, well, if you keep working
in a job there's a sure loss because you are not getting what you are worth. On the other hand if I startup I may make
money I may lose, but in the other option
there is a short loss. These people then are
willing to take risk. They get the courage. This is a bias that
has been talked about in literature
as the framing bias. It shows that people should however be indifferent
to probabilities, the expectations in the
case of 50% of 200, and 50% of zero, and a sure gain of 100. The utility, if we were to calculate the expectation
is the same,100 rupees. But people are more
likely to take risk when they look at the situation
in the frame of losses. When they are looking at the
situation in terms of gains, they become risk averse. What is the lesson? What is the message for us? When we look at the
information coming to us, we must not stick to one frame. It is always
beneficial to look at this situation from a gain frame if you are in a loss frame. If you are looking at this
situation from the gain frame, you must look at it from
the loss frame also, it will help you look
at the possibilities, the compromises that
you will have to make, and will give you an opportunity to take
better decisions. Otherwise, the general
tendency is that the gain frame will always lead to a risk-averse decision, a loss frame will always lead to a risk-seeking decision.
Thank you very much.

Hello learner. In this video, we learn about
the second important features that impacts our decision making and
that is attribute substitution. Let us start by looking at a situation. There was a very nice interesting
experiment that was conducted. A group of individuals were
asked these two questions and the questions were asked
in a sequential manner. They were first asked the question,
what's your level of overall happiness? And then afterwards they were
asked the second question, how many dates did you have last month? Now dates is not the fruit date, it is
how many outings with your girlfriend or boyfriend did you have last month? Their answers were looked at and an association was calculated
correlation in the answers on happiness. And how many dates did they have last
month was calculated and the answer. The correlation between the two
answers was non-significant, very small, -.12. Another group of people, individuals, were asked
the same two questions but they were asked in a different order. They were first asked the question, how many dates did you have last
month again, not the fruit date. How many outings did you
have with your girlfriend or boyfriend in the last month and
second, what's your level of happiness? You would be surprised to know
that the correlation that was non-significant, -0.12 in the first group, jumped to .66 for
the second group, there was a high association
that was found between the answer on happiness and
the answer on dates. What does this tell us? This feature is called as
the attributes substitution. If I were to ask you just think
about yourself your life and say, well how happy you are. That's a difficult question, isn't it? How happy I am? My happiness depends on a lot of things. What's going on in my personal life? What's going on in my professional life? What's happening at the job front? Am I doing what I like? There's so many things that impact
me when it comes to happiness. But if I were to ask you a question,
how happy you are or satisfied you are working in
your present organization. And then I want to ask
you how happy you are?. Now what have I given you? I have given you a peg I
have given you a crutch on which I can then ask
the happiness question. The first question on organization
is a little more specific. I can easily answer the question on am I
satisfied with my organization or not? Then I ask the happiness question. What happens is the brain
substitutes the difficult question which is the overall happiness
with the attributes of the question that I have just
answered which is organization. So the attributes,
the question of organization is then used to answer
the question of happiness and this feature of our brain is
called as attribute substitution. We kind of superimpose things and
aspects of a particular event,
a particular situation. A particular individual and then
superimposed on a lot of other things. Let's look at kind of a situation. Praguni is 31 years old, single,
outspoken and very bright. She did her MBA as a student and she was deeply concerned with
the issues of discrimination. And social justice and also participated
in anti nuclear demonstration. And then I would ask you to tell me,
given this first piece of information, what do you think Praguni
does when she has grown up? She is an investment banker and
is active in feminist movement and she is active in feminist movement. Out of these three options,
which do you think would be more likely? You can think about it. There are two arguments, Praguni is
more likely to be an investment banker, some women investment bankers are not
feminist and Praguni is one of them. Praguni is more likely to be a feminist
investment banker than she is likely to be an investment banker, because she resembles an active
feminist more than she resembles an investment banker. Now, it has been found that
people are more likely to choose the second argument
over the first argument. But let me tell you in this case, in this
situation, all three are equally likely. We tend to believe that Praguni would
be doing something because we have seen one specific characteristic which
is what she was doing as an MBA student. Now, we tend to superimpose that
we extrapolate that information to other things and
other situations as well about her career. We make decisions about what would be
her liking in terms of her career, the choices that she would be making etc. One trait induces judgments about
multiple traits and multiple dimensions. And this bias is called
as representative bias. Just by looking at one specific
thing we feel it is representative of the entire set of characteristics,
the entire individual. In extreme cases we can endorse a trait,
we can endorse the quality even when there
is no direct evidence of it. Well, think about how would
Praguni be dressing what kind of choices she would be having about
her food etc and that's a bias. That's a problem in decision making. Our brains do not keep track of the source
of information, they keep substituting. We don't remember what was
the piece of information, what was that relevant to the question
that I am now answering? But we keep substituting
those difficult questions and we ignore rationality,
we ignore laws of probability, and we are extremely poor at
recognizing randomness. And that's a big problem of attributes
substitution which leads to one of the important biases
which is representative bias. Thank you very much [MUSIC]

Hello learner. In this video, we'll learn about
another error, another bias of decision making that can be related to
the feature of attribute substitution. This bias is called as the sunk cost bias. There are different terms and
terminologies that are given. We also call it as escalation
of commitment bias. Let's look at a situation. Let's say that last month you
purchased a ticket for a movie. It cost you 300 rupees to see
a new science fiction movie that has been released and
is up there in the theaters. As the date approaches, you realize that
the show time that you have purchased the ticket for is clashing with
another appointment that you have got. What would you do? You have an appointment but
you have also purchased a ticket, you have invested 300 rupees in
the ticket to go and watch the movie. Most likely,
many of us would actually find out ways to maybe move around the appointment and
not take it up or not follow through with
that appointment and instead decide to go and watch the movie. It is very hard even for people who do not go to the theater and
take the appointment. It is very hard because
it feels that well, you had invested that 300 rupees in the
ticket and you had to watch that movie. Now this feeling that I had
invested something prior and therefore I must follow it up with
some action in the future too so that my investment is justified is
actually called as the sunk cost bias. What we fail to recognize at
these moments in these particular situations is that the sunk cost,
what we had invested prior is gone. It is an investment that
was of the past and it should not be relevant to
the future choices that we make. But in situations of uncertainty,
in situations of dilemma, the difficult question is
substituted with the easy question, which is the investment. Now the difficult question is should
you let go of the investment or should you follow up with
the investment that you had made? Well, we kind of follow it
up with the easy question, which is no, I had a particular
investment and so I should follow it up. Sunk cost actually is
relevant to decisions. Sunk cost has been paid already. So you must now think about carefully
what the additional incremental investment you will have to make if
you were to actually follow it up or you will take another decision,
another alternative. That's the real question. But we find it very difficult to
get over it and that is a problem. That is something that we must avoid. It is important to remember
that substitution will happen when you cannot
answer a difficult question. The difficult question will be
substituted with the easier question. Having said about these biases
that we have been discussing, we have talked about two important
features of decision making, which is associative coherence and
attribute substitution. We've discussed some of
the biases that we have covered. Where does this all lead us to? It tells us that there is a problem
in the way we take decisions. Let me give you a question,
a very simple question. A bat and a ball together cost 110 rupees. The bat costs one hundred
rupees more than the ball. How much does the bat and
ball cost separately? Write the answer in your notebooks. The answer to this question is
that the ball costs 5 rupees and the bat costs 105 rupees because the bat
has to cost 100 rupees more than the ball. But when we look at this situation, observe that the immediate tendency
in your brain, the immediate tendency of your mind is to write
that the answer is 100 and 10 rupees. 100 rupees for the bat,
10 rupees for the ball. But that's the wrong answer. That's a bias. That's the error of judgment. That's the error of decision making. So, when we look at situations, having
covered all these biases that we have been talking about,
we have covered all these two features. When we look at a situation, a problem, our brain goes by processing fluency. It tries to quickly come to a decision. It tries to quickly jump to a conclusion
and that processing is primed, it looks at coherence, it is clear. Anything that seems clear,
easy, and pleasant, the brain will pay more attention to that. What it will do. This leads to fluency. It leads to quick automatic decisions,
but the answers are familiar. We feel they are true. I have experienced them before. I am very confident of those decisions. Those are right decisions. Those are good decisions for me. But I want to tell you that this is wrong. This is an illusion. If you can process
something more fluently, it does not mean you are taking
the right decisions. You may have to step back, think more and then look at the data and
evidence to take right decisions. And that is extremely important
feature of taking good decisions, that you must overcome
the illusion of validity. You must overcome processing fluency and
work hard on your decisions. Thank you. [MUSIC]

Hello learner. In
this video we'll learn about the two systems
of decision making, system 1 and system 2. In earlier videos,
we have learned about the two features of
making decisions, associative coherence and
attribute substitution. We have also learned about the different biases that are related to
these two features. We will put all of this
together in this video and understand what are the two
ways of making decisions. Let us begin with
the first system of taking decisions which is called as the intuition-based
decision making, fast, automatic,
decision making. Let's look at this
photo, this image. If I were to ask you what's
the emotion being displayed? They would be very prompt
in answering this is anger, this is an angry child. Intuitions are actually the fast and automatic
mode of decision making. A lot of times you would
have heard people saying, how do I take decision? Well, I make intuitive
decisions, this was intuitive. There was a sense, it is gut feel, sixth sense. Many words that are
used when it comes to describing intuitions and
intuitive decision making. Well, there are many
examples of people taking intuitive decisions and
they are actually correct. The first image is grandmaster
Viswanathan Anand. Well, grandmasters can
play multiple moves. In a minute, they can
make multiple moves. They can play chess with multiple people at a time
and still not make errors. Well, I am a very
naive chess player and I find it hard to play
chess with even one person, whereas a grandmaster
can play chess with multiple people
and still be right. Sherlock Holmes, the
famous detective, often used to look at
the crime scene and intuitively decide
and identify what's going on and what could
be the possible clue to be looked at in this
particular crime scene that he was looking at. The third situation is
that of firefighters. In the very famous book, Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, he writes an incidence where the firefighters go into
a burning building. The leader of the pack
looks at the building on fire and immediately
orders the group, the team that he was leading to rush out and vacate
the building. As soon as they rush out and
come out of the building, the whole building collapses. So the author asked this leader, how did you know that you
have to vacate this building? The leader says, "Well, I don't know it was intuition, it was my gut feel,
it was blink. In that blink, I took that
decision and that was right.” There are experts who take decisions and these
decisions are automatic, these are fast, these are spontaneous, these
are effortless. The most important
thing that I want to tell you that it
comes to intuition, is that intuition is nothing more or nothing less than
pattern recognition. Whenever we say we
take intuitions, we take intuitive
decision making or we are working on intuitions, it's all about
recognizing the pattern. Grandmasters recognizes the
pattern on the chessboard, Sherlock Holmes
recognizes the pattern and the crime scene, the firefighters
recognize the pattern of buildings on fire, and they can take quick,
spontaneous, correct decisions. However, I have also
demonstrated over the course of many videos that our intuitions
could be problematic. The fast decisions could be driven by features of
coherence and substitution, and we could be making many
of these errors of judgment, biases of decision making, and our decisions, the first spontaneous
decisions could be wrong. What should we do
in such situations? We must also remember that
there is another system of decision making which we call as the algorithmic way
of decision making. Let's look at this
question displayed on the screen, 17 into 24. Can you write the
answer immediately? Well, at this moment, I don't know the number so I would need to do
some calculations, I will need to do the
multiplication and then I will come to
the answer of 408. What happened? I had
to take the decision, I had to come to a conclusion, but then I had to pause. I had to spend time and do the calculations to
reach to this answer. This is the way or
system of taking decisions which is called as algorithmic based
decision making, algorithms are used
to take decisions. What is important to recognize, that this is slow. Seventeen into 24 needs
time to be calculated, it is deliberate, it
has to be invoked. You have to consciously
ask your brain to work on this problem and
calculate the answer. It takes effort, it is
effortful, it is organized. It has certain steps to be followed in order to
reach to the answer, and it is very methodical. It has a set of algorithms that will be used to
compute the answer. So there are two ways
of taking decisions. One is what we call
as the intuitions, the other one is the algorithmic
based decision making. Then algorithms will step in only when you consciously
involve them. When you realize that at this
time I must be cautious, that this decision
making or this problem my intuitions may
lead me astray, my intuitions may not be right when it comes to
taking decisions. In those situations when you
do not know the right answer or you have a sense that your intuitions may
not be correct, you have to augment your system 1 type
of decision making, which is intuitive decision
making with algorithms. You have to use algorithms, you have to use data, you should look out
for more information. As we have been discussing
in our earlier videos, that there is a need to
rethink, take a pause, look at more evidence, and then use algorithms, methods to come to
the right decision. One very good way to
check your decision is what we call as pre-moterm. Just imagine that the
decision that you implemented in whatever you were doing turned
out to be wrong. You must ask yourself, what did I miss? If the decision that
I'm going to implement, if that turns out to be wrong, what could be the
possible reasons for that decision to go wrong? That may motivate you to
look for more information, and this is what we
call as pre-mortem. Don't do a postmortem of your
decision, do a pre-mortem. Ask yourself, is there any
information that I am missing? Is there any information
that I need to look at? That may help you in augmenting your intuitions with algorithms and your decision
making maybe better. Remember there is a
system 1 which is fast, intuitive decision making, but there is also system 2 and your intuitions
can be wrong. While there are experts who can
take intuitive decisions, but there are also many biases that are associated
with the intuitions. You must always
think of augmenting your intuitions with data
and algorithms. Thank you.

[MUSIC] Hello learner. In this video, we will learn about
developing skilled intuitions. In an earlier video, I had talked about
the two systems of decision making, System 1 which is
intuitive decision making. System 2 which is
algorithmic decision making. We had also discussed that
system one decision making could be right in some cases,
in cases of experts, but it could also be driven by biases. Intuitions can be problematic. We have been learning that
there are different biases that impact the automatic
spontaneous decisions. Now, let's think about how can
we build skilled intuitions. Intuitions can be right,
intuitions could also be wrong. And under what circumstances
should we believe our intuitions? What is the characteristic of
those experts who can take spontaneous decisions,
but they are correct? What is it that is there
with Sherlock Holmes? hat is it that is there with
Viswanathan and grandmasters? What is there with those firefighters
who could look at the situation and then be able to recognize
what's the right thing to do. And that is what we call
as skilled intuitions. The first thing about developing
skilled intuition is that whatever you are looking at the situation about
which you want to take a decision, it should first present enough
regularity that can be learned. There should be enough
cues that one can practice over time and develop intuitions about. Now, when it comes to the chessboard,
we all recognize that there are specific patterns and there are limited patterns
that can be learned over time. Similarly, there are buildings on fire. They present enough regularity
that somebody can look at it over time again and again and
practice them and learn them. The same thing is with the crime scenes. There are specific sets of regularity
that can be associated with them. So the first thing to remember is
the event or the situation for which you are trying to develop intuitions
should present some regularity. Now, a very nice example to demonstrate things where finding
patterns is difficult. And the most prominent example where finding pattern is very
difficult is a stock market. Stock markets are actually random,
especially in the short term. It is very difficult to
predict how the market is going to do tomorrow day after and
so on. So, in those cases, no matter how much you
look at the market, it is very difficult we are unable to predict what's
going to happen tomorrow towards stock market, elections,
economic environment. These are examples of environments
that are very difficult to predict, which do not give us patterns
that can be learned. In those cases,
pundits are only as good as you are. You may say that something,
it's pure luck, it is random. So the first condition is, there
are some patterns that can be learned. There are patterns on offer. The second, obviously you would
understand intuition is nothing but pattern recognition. If there are patterns, then one must
be motivated enough to practice. One, you will need to spend time, you will need to invest time and
energy to practice it. It is not to say that
grandmasters are born overnight. We don't say that grandmaster
is born overnight. Sherlock Holmes is made overnight. These people have invested a lot of time
and effort in learning those patterns. So don't get swayed ever by people who say
that I take intuitive decision making and I'm right. Well, those people may have invested
a lot of time learning those patterns. The third, but I want to remind you of the two selves
that we have been talking about. The quick reactionary,
believing self, like the ego. And the other one, which is cool,
reflective, thoughtful and pays attention. You've got to remind yourself
that when it comes to practice, you have to practice mindfully. You have to practice with awareness and
attention. If you are distracted and
you are driven by the ego, that's the first self that
we are talking about. No, no matter how much time you are
looking at the pattern in front of you, you may actually not be paying attention. So, when it comes to learning those
patterns, you have to invest time. All right, but
you must also do it mindfully. This is a quote that I would want to
remind you of Sherlock Holmes and he says, “how much an observant man
might learn by an accurate and systematic examination of
all that came his way.” Remember observant man, a mindful person. So there has to be patterns,
those patterns have to be learned, you must invest time. And you must learn those mindfully, you will have to pay attention and
that is where talent comes in. Many people start playing chess, many people start playing cricket,
not everybody becomes a Vishwanathan. And not everybody becomes
a Sachin Tendulkar, you have to invest time first and
you have to invest time mindfully with awareness and that is what
makes us great in our decisions. That is what makes us
great in our daily life. So overall remember there are systems, there is an intuition based
system of making decision, but that could be skilled,
that could also be unskilled. And it is important to be forewarned, because if you are careful
then you are also forearmed. So be aware, think carefully,
look at the data, build your skilled institutions and
then take the decision. Thank you very much. [MUSIC]

Hello, learner. In this video, we will start with a new topic, which we call as
supportive communication. Now, as a leader, communication is a must. Communication is essential if we have to communicate
our message. With the subordinates, we have to communicate effectively. When we are leading teams, when we are leading a
group of individuals, it becomes extremely important that we learn some
of the specifics, some of the aspects of
supportive communication. How do we lead our team
members in a way that they feel nice about the whole thing
while they are being led. In this video, let us
start to look at some of the essential ideas of
supportive communication. Now, let us start by
looking at this caselet, which describes a
situation between Prakash Mehta and
Chandresh Desai. This is a caselet which
describes Prakash Mehta, who is a new manager, who has been newly appointed, he goes and visits
the shop floor, and Chandresh Desai is the person who is
managing the shop floor. So Prakash Mehta goes and pays a visit and there
is an interaction, there is a communication, there is a conversation
that happens between Prakash Mehta
and Chandresh Desai. I would want you to, as you
read this conversation, you've got to think
about what went right in the communication
and what went wrong. What are some of the problems
that this communication, that this conversation
possesses? What are some of the good
things that may have happened? But more importantly,
what are some of the missing aspects from
this communication? I want you to take your notes, read the caselet, think about it, and make some observations
in the notebook. Now once you have
read the caselet, once you have analyzed
the whole situation, we can look at that there
are some important, some glaring issues that
happen from both sides, Prakash Mehta's side and
Chandresh Desai's side. The first thing, let's
look at how does Prakash communicate
with Chandresh. Now, as soon as Prakash
goes and meets Chandresh, he goes there with a lot
of preconceived notions, with a lot of pre-determined
ideas of what is all that is going wrong at Chandresh's shop floor,
Chandresh's factory. There are judgments. Prakash Mehta makes judgments about
being too chummy with the females, not wearing a tie at the shop floor and the factory not
being very clean. There is a power distance
that we see very clearly. As soon as they meet,
Chandresh says, “well, you are just another
supervisor who has come here to pass judgments
and to criticize. There is going to be
a lot of criticism,” and that is exactly what
Prakash Mehta does. He starts by criticizing. There is no appreciation. There was no
appreciation of what is perhaps good that
Chandresh is doing. But no, there are criticisms
one after the other. But essentially, if
you were to ask me, there is only one
important thing that he should have said, which is about maybe the reports
not being done properly. Other things were
actually trivial, other things were actually maybe not worth being talked about, especially in the first meeting. From Chandresh's side, we see
there is closure to feedback, there is resistance. When you have a
subordinate like this, it becomes all the more
important for the leader to reflect on how he or she
is going to communicate. We see when we talk
about communication, I would want you to think about this important adjective
before communication, which is supportive
communication. This important word actually denotes that as leaders
and supervisors, we've got to communicate
in a way which builds the relationship that we have with our subordinates. Communication is not just
about message delivered. Communication is also about
building relationships. And if we don't
communicate in a way, which is building relationships, then we are having a
problem in our offices, in our factories, and so on. You got to remember
there could be many, many difficult issues that
you may have to tackle. At that time, the
way you communicate, the kind of words you use becomes extremely
important to reflect on. Even when you are
giving a feedback, you have to give a feedback, but you have to also
preserve the relationship. A supportive communication
is empowering. When we communicate,
people should feel empowered to do things rather
than being constrained. This conversation
between Prakash and Chandresh shows that
the subordinate feels so constrained by the way the supervisor
is communicating. So remember, friends, when we talk about
communication, it is about building
positive energy. It is about creating relationships that can
deliver better performance, faster problem-solving,
leads to higher outputs, and most importantly,
stronger relationships at the workplace. We've got to think
about communication, not just as delivering messages, but also building
relationships and developing positive energy
at the workplace. Thank you.

Hello learner. In this video, we'll discuss the
first element of supportive communication,
which is listening. Let us start with an exercise. I want you to reflect
on a good communicator. Anybody in your life at office
or at home whom you think is a good communicator, whom
you find nice talking to. Reflect on how do
you communicate? How does that
person communicate? You've got to maybe observe
that individual as well as, you should also observe how you communicate when you are
talking to somebody else. Think of a situation when you are in a conversation
with someone else, when you talk to the person, try this exercise on yourself. When you communicate to
somebody else, listen intently, as if you have to repeat what the
other person is saying. That's the second exercise. The first exercise was
“observe and reflect on a good communicator whom you think you feel very
comfortable about.” The second exercise is,
when you communicate, you listen carefully
and then you have to pay so much attention
that you can even repeat what the other
person said to you. Now try this out and think
of some observations, some reflections that you have. If you can make it,
you can think about writing it down right away or you can do it at a later point. Now, one of the principles of supportive communication is
what we call as listening. Listening is the first and the most important element of
being a good communicator. We actually say that if you have to be good
at communication, you have to be an
exceptional listener. Now the two exercises that
I asked you to think about, the first one, observing
a good communicator, and the second one yourself, when you are in a conversation, you listen intently as if you have to repeat what the
other person is saying. You will see that in
both these situations, the aspect of listening plays a very important role in
driving good communication. The first thing that
listening actually brings is, it enables us to pay attention. Remember in our earlier videos, we've talked about that the mind or the brain cannot multitask? We have also said that if you
have to do something well, you have to pay attention. Live in the present moment. This is actually the same thing. Listening is actually playing on the same principle that we have to pay attention if we
have to respond effectively. Only if you can
pay attention can you be a good communicator. It is also said that when
we talk about listening, we must first understand. Listen with an intent to understand the other person
and then to be understood. Before you speak something, you have to make an attempt to actually understand what
the other person is saying, and in order to do that, you have to listen. You have to pay attention. If you cannot stop talking, there is only one golden
rule to be a good listener, and I always say,
it is “stop talking.” You have to stop talking in order to be able
to listen what the other person is saying and pay your undivided attention. If you can pay that attention, if you can give that attention, you will be better in asking
questions rather than asking trivial or
unnecessary questions. If you are paying attention, you will be able to
better understand the situation and ask
better questions. Rather than thinking that or believing that people
should listen to you, if you have to communicate well, if you have to be good at
supportive communication, your first aim should
be to understand, to listen to what the
other person is saying. If you can listen, it gives you a chance to maybe understand the
other person's position, which we actually
call as empathy. Empathy can only come
when we can listen, when we can pay attention to what the other person is saying. Stop arguing, stop criticizing, pay attention, try
to understand. That may help you empathize and better understand the
other person's position. Let us go back to the caselet
that we discussed in our earlier video between Prakash Mehta and
Chandrish Desai. Just go back and read the
conversation again and look at the listening principle being applied to that communication. Actually it is missing. Prakash Mehta did not listen
to what Chandrish Desai was trying to tell him
rather he was there as if, “you’ve got to listen to me, I'm here to say, these are four bullet points that
I want to talk about, I want to criticize you.” There is no listening
that is being done. Chandrish had some explanations, but Prakash just
kept dismissing and then went on to the second
point, the third point, and so on. There is no empathy at display. There is no understanding
at the display, there is a lot of
criticism and a lot of arguments that go on
in that communication. Please understand
listening is that quality, is that principle of
communication that helps us look at the other
person's side of things. It enables us to understand what the other
person is trying to say. It enables us to empathize, to maybe look at things, what they are trying to say
in a better perspective. Lastly, remember if you
have to be a good listener, let the other person do
a great deal of talking. Stop talking to both on the outside as well
as on the inside. Only if you can stop
talking you can be a good listener.
Thank you very much.

Hello, learner. In this video, we will talk about
the second principle of supportive communication, which is being non-judgmental. We are exceptional at passing judgments about others.
When we communicate, we are very quick to
jump onto judgments. We say that this person
did this right or wrong. This person is like this, this person is like that. In our earlier videos, we talked about
decision-making biases. How jumping to quick decisions could be flooded with
a lot of biases, with a lot of errors. The same thing can happen
in communications. When we are making
passing statements, then we are framing our statements that we
will speak with others, it becomes extremely important to be careful about judgments. In this video, I'll talk about three important aspects
of being non-judgmental, which can help us
save ourselves, which can help us step
back from the judgments, and make better communication. Be better at the communications
that we do with others. The first element of being non-judgmental is
being descriptive. When we describe a situation, we focus on what has happened, what is it that can be done
to improve this situation. When we are descriptive we say, here is what has happened. Here is my reaction. Here is a suggestion that can help improve the
situation rather than jumping onto the
judgment that you are good or you are bad and you
did this right or wrong. It is important when there
is something that goes wrong or when you think that there is something
that has happened, rather than being judgmental,
try being descriptive. Let me show you an example. One way of responding to
the situation would be that you are extremely bad
at customer relations, you don't know the job. The other way could be, three clients have
complained to me this month that you have not
responded to their request. I'm worried that
this could threaten our relationships with them and they could go
somewhere else. We need to win back
their confidence. Now you see this is very, very clear, describing
what has happened, what I think about
the situation, and what can be done to
improve this situation. Remember, be descriptive
rather than being judgmental. The second. Always be problem-oriented rather
than person-oriented. It is a cliched saying, and so
it's a very common saying: “Hate the sin, not the sinner.” We've got to move
away from people. Focus on the problem. Tell them what's the issue, how can we solve a
particular problem rather than saying because of
you, this problem exists. Now you see the second
statement which is more person-focused. The first one is problem
focus, which says, well, this is the problem and we got to solve this
particular problem. The third is be specific. Do not talk in terms
of general things. Do not generalize things,
universalize things. Talk about specific things that you believe
should be corrected. Focus on what are the
specific attitudes or behaviors that you may want to be improved by
the other person. What are the
specific elements of performance that
need to be improved? Rather than saying, well, everything is bad about you. Everything is not good
about this situation. Everything is not good
about this specific event. The example is, well, “you interrupted me three
times in this conversation” rather than saying “you’re
always try to get attention.” You see the second statement
is more judgmental. Let's go back to the caselet
that we have been talking about between Prakash
Mehta and Chandresh Desai. While both are judgmental,
Chandresh Desai is also judgmental, He judges Prakash
and says, “well, you always do these things
you criticize, etc.” But we should all think
about this situation from the shoes of Prakash
Mehta: as leaders, as people who have to
lead subordinates. What is it that we can do? Look at what Prakash
does while he has a bigger responsibility as a leader to motivate Chandresh, what does he do? Rather than
talking about specifics, rather than talking about the problems, he talks about, “well, Chandresh you do this, people see you like this.” It's more person-oriented. You don't wear a tie, you are too chummy with females, and so on and so forth. There is no appreciation. It's all very global. Everything is bad
with the shop floor, everything is dirty, and
all reports are wrong, etc. There are mistakes that
are being pointed out even unnecessarily as we have
talked in an earlier video. We see Prakash passing
a lot of judgments. When we judge people, people become closed
in that communication. It is no more empowerment, it is no more supportive, and that is a problem. Elements of a good
non-judgemental communication is please postpone the
judgments as much as you can. Look at the data, give yourself time to
look at the evidence. That's the only way we
can overcome judgments. Listen carefully to what
people are trying to say. Look at the evidence that can
disconfirm your hypothesis, disconfirm your beliefs,
and try to empathize. Only when you can look at the data when you
can listen carefully then you give
yourself a chance to empathize with others.
Thank you very much.

[MUSIC] Hello learner. In this video, we'll learn about the third
important principle of supportive communication which we call
as validating communication. Now there are two words when we talk
about validating communication: validating and invalidating. Invalidating communication is
a communication that conveys superiority, that conveys ego, that conveys arrogance, that conveys indifference
to the other person. Whereas, validating communication,
is that communication which conveys respect, dignity,
appreciation, flexibility and open transparent two-way
communication to the other person. When we communicate with people,
we can either convey arrogance and indifference, or we can convey respect and
flexibility in our communication. So in this video I'll talk about four
qualities of validating communication which we must keep in mind as we
communicate with our subordinates, as we communicate with people around us. The first one is affirming. Always find opportunities to appreciate
and show respect to the other person. Begin with praise and honest
appreciation when you are communicating. Try to give people a chance to say yes
to you rather than saying no to you. Try to postpone the statement that,
you are wrong. You must always begin with
an honest effort to convey that you appreciate the point being made,
that you appreciate the effort that is being put by the other person and
that is what we call as affirm. Affirm, that means convey respect,
convey appreciation to the other person. The second important aspect of
validating communication is what we call as being conjunctive
rather than disjunctive. Conjunctive is a word which means that
you build on prior communication, rather than disjunctive which
essentially means that you start to say things which are absolutely not
related to what has been said prior. Always find opportunities and ways
that you can build on the points that have been made by your team members,
by your subordinates, rather than just saying things that
have absolutely no connection, there's absolutely no relationship
with what the other person is saying. Being disjunctive actually shows
that you are absent minded or you are not paying attention, and
that is actually a problem; that shows lack of interest of the leader in
what the subordinate is trying to say. A good example is,
relating to what you just said, I would like to raise this concern. On the other hand, say, well, I want to say this, irrespective of what
you are saying, this is my point of view. So there is no relationship
with what has been said prior. The third important aspect is
accept as much as you can; acceptance of the other
person rather than rejection. Focus on statements which convey respect,
flexibility and areas of agreement. You've got to find out
ways to actually agree. That actually shows that there is
an effort being made by you, the leader, to go forward and see some middle
ground in what is being said. Talk in terms of people’s interest,
talk in terms of the ideas that people are trying to build up, rather than just
saying what you think is important. Try to involve people. And we have seen in earlier videos when we
were talking about empowering behavior, we said consulting is a very
important aspect of empowerment. So try to take people's suggestions
on board, give them a chance to voice opinions rather than just shutting them up
and not listening to what they are saying. So, the last thing of validating
communication is clarifying: giving people enough clarity of “What's the issue?
What is it that you expect from them?” I would like to show you this chart,
which comes from a piece of research that says that leaders
should give enough clarity--which is not too much because if it is too much,
it becomes micromanaging, so you are telling them each and
every thing, and if it is too less, then it means you are not interested or
you are indifferent, you are not paying attention or you don't want to give
attention to the other person. The sweet spot is somewhere in between,
and that is most empowering. So empowerment and
clarity is actually an inverted U-curve, high clarity is micromanaging, not so
empowering, low clarity is also disempowering because it just
doesn't convey enough information. Coming back to the caselet that we have
been talking about, Prakash Mehta and Chandresh Desai, I look at how
invalidating the entire conversation was. Prakash Mehta just kept saying
things that came to his mind and rejecting what Chandresh
was trying to say. There was no respect,
dignity that was being communicated, there was no appreciation
that was being communicated, there was no clarity in the whole thing as
to what Prakash Mehta actually wants changed. It was like a fault-finding mission
that was being carried out, and the last, which is most disappointing,
is disjunctive. Irrespective of what Chandresh was saying, he was just jumping from one point to
another, not building on the conversation. I had four points to raise, here I am to raise those four points
irrespective of what you are saying. So it is very important to
remember that when we talk about communication which is validating,
it is about affirming, it is about clarifying,
it is about being conjunctive, and it is about accepting
rather than rejecting. And validating
communications are extremely important when it comes to empowerment and
supportive communication. Thank you very much. [MUSIC]

Hello learner. In this video, we’ll talk about the
fourth principle of supportive communication, which is being authentic. As the word authentic signifies, it is about leading by example, it is about being truthful, it is about owning up the conversation
that you are having. We’ll look at three
important aspects of authentic communication. The first one is
being accountable, walking the talk, leading
with accountability. What does accountability mean when it comes to communication? The first thing is you must ensure that you have kept the promises
that you have made. You should show things that
you have promised in action, you should have--whatever
you have committed, you must show that it
is implemented. A lot of times as leaders, we do not own up our own
mistakes, our own shortcomings. Another aspect of accountability is owning up the mistakes, leading by example, showing
that you are honest and sincere enough to even accept that you have
made a mistake. If there is something
wrong, admit it, and be humble and open
enough to say that, yes, you have made that mistake. First of all, make
all the efforts to actually follow through on the promises that you have made in whatever communication
you've had. The second, is always tell the truth, do not manipulate. Honesty is a very important
aspect of communication. Try to be as truthful in the
communication as you can be. If there is something
that upsets you, tell people frankly that this is something I do not like, this is not what I
would like to happen in my office rather
than ignoring it and then not communicating
the right thing. The last thing about authentic communication is
own your communication. If there is something
that you do not like, do not speak in third person, that because of those people, because of some other reasons, this will not happen. If you think there's something that needs to
be done, then own up. This is, speak in
the first person. Say, “this is what I like and
this is what I don't like.” Remember in an earlier video, when we were talking
about leadership, I had talked about
authenticity as a very important
aspect of leadership. I had said at that time that as a leader you will
need to have courage. When you lead by example, you lead by example
and courage as well. So if there is something
that you don't like, you've got to
communicate it. You've got to be courageous enough to say that this
is what I don't like. Don't give people the impression that you are okay
with something, but there are other things, those other people may not like what is going to happen. That brings authenticity. Owning up conversations
shows passion, shows that you are interested or disinterested in
a particular thing. Then we look at Prakash
Mehta and Chandresh Desai. Actually, I would
say that this is one place where Prakash
Mehta does well. He uses 'I,' he demonstrates that. He does not say that “well, management does not
like this Chandresh.” He was talking in terms of first-person; that shows
that he was willing to take a stand and say that
this is something I do not accept or I do not like. There is something that
is important when we communicate and that is the
principle of authenticity, which becomes extremely
important when we are talking, conversing, and
displaying support in our communication.
Thank you very much.

[MUSIC] Hello learner. In this video, we'll try to put
everything together that we have been talking about in earlier videos. And we'll talk about fundamental
techniques of handling people. If you remember in earlier videos,
we've talked about decision making biases. When we were looking at decision making,
we said that there are two important features that impact
how we take decisions. The feature of attribute substitution and
the feature of associative coherence. Both of these features lead to
certain decision making biases. When we take spontaneous
automatic quick decisions, these features can actually impact our
decisions and lead to certain errors. We defined that when it
comes to decision making, there are two important
systems that exist in us. The first one is what we call as System 1,
which is intuitive decision making. Intuition we defined as the element
of pattern recognition. We also discussed that there
are experts who can take quick spontaneous decisions and
those decisions are right. They are extremely good at taking
quick split of a second decision. And those decisions often
go through very well. On the other hand, there are decisions
that are fretted with many biases. So we discussed that there are skilled
intuitions and unskilled intuitions. As leaders, one of the fundamental
techniques of handling people is to recognize that we may have
skilled intuitions about few things. We may also have unskilled
intuitions about many things. If we have to decide when
we should trust our intuitions, we must remind ourselves that
intuitions are nothing more and nothing less than pattern recognition. You must be able to
recognize the patterns and those patterns you've practiced and
learned over time. If you have not learned those patterns,
if you have not seen those patterns, then your decision making
could actually be wrong. And therefore,
it is important at that point in time to build on your System 2
of decision making. You must complement your intuitions with
System 2 and System 2 is nothing but data based, evidence based,
algorithmic decision making. You must remind yourself that this
could be a situation that I am not familiar with. And so before I trust my intuition and
take a decision, let me look at the evidence. You are giving yourself a better
chance of taking decisions, chance at taking better decisions,
more correct decisions if you are complimenting your
intuitions with System 2, which is data, evidence, and algorithms. So if you have to remember,
please, when we deal with people, we must not rely on memory. Our memory could be biased,
our intuitions could be biased. Look for more data, look for
disconfirming evidence. Don't try to look for
evidence that supports your hypothesis. Make an effort to look for
disconfirming evidence and remember past sunk cost may not be
the best thing to base your decision on. You've got to think about the future
investments, the incremental investments that you have to make on a particular
topic, on a particular decision. Remember, our intuitions could be unskilled
and we must bank on algorithms and data. That's about decision making and
overcoming decision making biases. Using this information about decision
making biases, we should remember that our communication could be impacted
by these biases of decision making. What we communicate is an action. We do something because we have spoken
out certain words and that's an action. And when you have spoken those words,
those words cannot be undone. There is a very nice saying that
says “a fool thinks after he or she speaks and an intelligent person
thinks before he or she speaks.” So once you have communicated,
once you have spoken the words, well, there is nothing much you can do about. So, prior to speaking, communicating, you must remember principles
of supportive communication. Communication is built on listening, listening to understand
rather than being understood. You've got to understand what the other
person is trying to tell you. You've got to postpone
the judgments as much as you can. Try to be descriptive,
problem oriented, and specific, rather than being global,
person oriented and judgmental. Also when you talk to others and
talk about certain ideas, please show validation. Please be accepting,
clear in your communication. Build on these statements or conversation
that has happened before rather than being disjunctive and try to affirm;
showcase an honest appreciation. If you don't do that,
you will be invalidating, and that's showing disrespect
to the other person. And lastly, be authentic,
own up your conversation. Speak in the first person,
show courage and say this is something that I don't like. This is what I would like to be done and
be accountable. If you have made certain promises,
if you have committed to certain things, try to follow them up through your
actions rather than just words. So it is very important when
we are building relationships, communication plays a very important role. Decision making plays
a very important role. When we communicate,
our communication should be empowering. Communication should be supportive and
communication should be such that it builds positive energy and
strengthens relationships. Communication is not just
about message delivered. Communication is also about strengthening
relationships between the two parties. Thank you very much. [MUSIC]